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Video Library

Since 2002 Perimeter Institute has been recording seminars, conference talks, and public outreach events using video cameras installed in our lecture theatres. Perimeter now has 7 formal presentation spaces for its many scientific conferences, seminars, workshops and educational outreach activities, all with advanced audio-visual technical capabilities. Recordings of events in these areas are all available On-Demand from this Video Library and on Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive (PIRSA). PIRSA is a permanent, free, searchable, and citable archive of recorded seminars from relevant bodies in physics. This resource has been partially modelled after Cornell University's arXiv.org.

I first summarize how the recent avalanche of precision measurements involving the cosmic microwave background, galaxy clustering, the Lyman alpha forest, gravitational lensing, supernovae Ia and other tools probes has transformed our understanding of our universe. I then discuss key open problems such as the nature of dark matter, dark energy and the early universe.

With a cosmic flight simulator, we'll take a scenic journey through space and time. After exploring
our local Galactic neighborhood, we'll travel back 13.7 billion years to explore the Big Bang itself and
how state-of-the-art measurements are transforming our understanding of our cosmic origin and ultimate fate.
We then turn to the question of whether this can all be described purely mathematically, and discuss
implications ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units,

Cosmology ultimately aims to explain the initial conditions at the beginning of time and the entire subsequent evolution of the universe. The "beginning of time" can be understood in the Wheeler-DeWitt approach to quantum gravity, where homogeneous universes are described by a Schroedinger equation with a potential barrier. Quantum tunneling through the barrier is interpreted as a spontaneous creation of a small (Planck-size) closed universe, which then enters the regime of cosmological inflation and reaches an extremely large size.

Quantum Groups in Physics.
With the gained background we want to review known quantum groups that became relevant in physics.
Especially q-Deformation, kappa-Poincare- and theta-Poincare-Algebras are discussed.

This is the central unit of the course - we quantize universal enveloping algebras and their duals. Central discussion is the fact that for the first type of Hopf-algebras the deformation of the coproduct is sufficient and for the second type it is the dual multiplication. This motivates the way quantization is performed in particular and how this gives rise for noncommutativity for the module and comodule spaces that are so interesting for physics. Currently most popular way to quantize universal enveloping algebras is the twisting according to Drinfeld.